Bio:

I am a sociocultural linguist who focuses on the linguistic practices of transgender and LGBQ speakers through a combination of ethnographic, discourse analytic, and sociophonetic methods. Much of my work is concerned with the complex relationship between identity and gendered embodiment, which I approach from two perspectives.

The first arm of my research concerns the innovative use of body part terminology in primarily internet-mediated transgender communities of practice. By exploring how trans speakers combine traditionally female and male genital terminology, this work highlights the ways trans bodies challenge our most basic ideas about gender and sex. Rather than treating sex as the natural, objectively real, biological state of the body, trans speakers push us to recognize the fluidity and socially constructed nature of “female” and “male” embodiment.

This understanding of the gendered body informs my sociophonetic research on the production and perception of the voice’s gendered characteristics. In this work, I have emphasized the complexity of gender differences in the voice, which exist not in pre-packaged female and male types, but rather are constructed through innovative combinations of disparate linguistic resources that take on meaning only with respect to their context of occurrence.

As a whole, my research program and advocacy are aimed at challenging prevailing notions about gender, sex, and the body in both linguistics and broader cultural contexts, offering in their place a socially-grounded understanding of the body that centers non-normative genders and better accounts for the full range of gendered subjectivities.

Education

2012 Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder

Current Projects

Examining the intersections of race and gender in the voices of trans people of color;

Tracking changes in the use of body part terminologies in trans communities;

Theorizing the interactional and social meanings of creaky voice quality;

In collaboration with colleagues at Reed College, analyzing the social distribution of creaky voice quality across a gender-diverse sample;

Documenting developments in trans communities’ linguistic activism;

The construction of agency with respect to gender presentation and identity.

Activities

General Editor, Oxford University Press’s series, Studies in Language, Gender, and Sexuality